Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at Computer World asks himself when he first started using Linux after attending the Linux Foundation Summit where several others were asked the same question. The Linux Foundation has posted a video of some of the answers; boy, do I feel young.

I got my undergrad degree in 1996. My first PC with Linux, I think, I got in 1995, where I got Red Hat that defaulted to some < 1.0 kernel but had a 1.2 kernel as optional. I'd been exposed to it before that when we needed to set up machines for a programming competition, so we got our hands on an early Slackware, which places that in 1993 at the earliest.

I'd always been interested in more non-mainstream computers. My first x86 machine, I got in 1995 with the full intention of installing Linux. I used some tool to repartition the drive and dual boot Windows 95 and Linux. I remember naming the machine "normal" because I had just read a Douglas Adams novel that had characters who hunted "perfectly normal beasts." My graphics card (some pre-Rage ATI) had a whopping 1 meg of framebuffer, so the best I could do was 8-bit color at 1152x864. I thought that was so great. I used that computer to develop my senior project, which was a raytracer, and I recall being somewhat frustrated by having to implement dithering methods to be able to see what I was rendering. Before the Linux PC, I was an avid Atari user. I had 8-bit computers first, then an ST, then a Falcon. One day, something clicked in my head, and I decided that I wanted something with a cutting-edge CPU, so I went out and bought this Pentium box from CompUSA. Linux turned out to be even cooler because it wasn't just a community around a platform (as it was with Atari and Amiga users), but a community of Free Software, where people shared a heck of a lot more too.